April 2013

April 22, 2013

A federal trial judge in Washington today refused to put the brakes on the effort by U.S. securities regulators to squeeze audit documents from a Deloitte unit in China.

U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler adopted the recommendation of a magistrate judge who'd determined the subpoena enforcement proceeding, which tests the scope of the power of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to grab documents abroad, should no longer be subject to a stay order.

"It has been more than twenty-two months since the SEC first sought these documents from Deloitte," Kessler said in her ruling. "Obviously, a thorough, comprehensive investigation only gets more difficult with the passage of time."

Lawyers for Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu CPA Ltd., represented by teams from Sidley Austin and Latham & Watkins, fought to keep the case on ice as the securities agency’s lawyers negotiated with counterparts in China to try to obtain the documents.

A year after Greenberg Traurig revealed that it started
lobbying for Netflix Inc., the law firm's work for the video subscription
service ended.

Greenberg Traurig filed a lobbying termination report with
Congress last week, saying it stopped advocating for Netflix on February 28.
President Barack Obama on January 10 signed into law legislation that
amended the Video Privacy Protection Act, the target of Greenberg Traurig's
lobbying.

Netflix hired Greenberg Traurig to push for the amendment
bill, which gave the company's U.S. members the ability to use Facebook to
automatically share details about movies and television shows they watch.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear the government's appeal of a decision finding that Congress violated the compensation clause when it withheld cost of living salary adjustments for federal judges in the 1990s and in 2007 and 2010.

The denial of review in U.S. v. Beer ended litigation that had roots more than three decades ago.

The en banc U.S.. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled last fall that a 1989 law prevented Congress from abrogating the law 's "precise and definite commitment" to automatic yearly cost of living adjustments for sitting members of the judiciary. The appellate court ruling is here.

Pro Bono Mandate Gains Steam: Karen Sloan reports that the State Bar of California is poised to join the New York State court system in adopting a pro bono requirement for new attorneys.

Judges Crack Under Pressure: Overloaded dockets, stagnant pay and amateur litigants are being blamed for the growing number of judicial disciplinary problems. Leigh Jones has the story.

View From the Top: In recent months, Matthew Huisman sat down with managing partners at Washington firms small and large to take an inside look at what it's like to sit at the top.

High Court Limits Reach of Tort Law: The U.S. Supreme Court sharply limited the reach of a federal law used to hold corporations and others accountable for human rights abuses committed abroad. But Marcia Coyle reports that human rights lawyers predicted additional litigation over the degree to which the federal courthouse door was left ajar.

Russian Warning: The FBI in early 2011 received a warning from
Russian officials about suspected marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who
was killed in a firefight with police Friday morning, The Boston Globereports. The Russian authorities said he may have been a follower of
“radical Islam." Police captured his younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev,
on Friday evening after a more than 20-hour manhunt.

Death Penalty: Kaufman County, Texas, special prosecutors are
weighing the death penalty for a former justice of the peace and his
wife, who are charged with murdering the county's district attorney, his wife and one
of his assistant prosecutors, the Texas Lawyer reports. "Obviously, the case is still under investigation," said Toby Shook, one
of the special prosecutors. "That decision won't be made until the
investigation is complete."

USA Today: USA Today founder Allen Neuharth died Friday at 89, the newspaper reports. He died after sustaining injuries in a fall at his home.

April 19, 2013

In a settlement that includes one of the largest divestures of all time, beer giant Anheuser-Busch InBev reached a deal with the Department of Justice today to proceed with its acquisition of Grupo Modelo.

But winning antitrust approval came at a steep price. The company must divest Modelo's entire U.S. business, including beer brands such as Corona, as well as its most advanced brewery.

The assets will be sold to Constellation Brands, Inc. for an estimated $4.75 billion, and will make Constellation the third-biggest beer company in the United States.

A man who was arrested inside the U.S. Supreme Court last year for refusing to remove his jacket is fighting to keep alive his lawsuit in Washington federal district court.

The high court visitor, Fitzgerald Scott, was wearing a jacket painted with the words "Occupy Everywhere." The authorities determined the clothing, with its accompanying message, violated a federal law that restricts certain expressive activity inside the Supreme Court. Scott refused to remove the jacket. He was arrested.

Scott alleges in his suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that the authorities had no ground to arrest him. U.S. Justice Department lawyers said in February, in court papers seeking the dismissal of the case, that federal law prohibited the political message on Scott's jacket. Police had ample cause to ask Scott to remove the jacket or leave the building, according to DOJ.

Scott's attorney, Jeffrey Light, a Washington solo practitioner, this week responded to the government's effort to end the case. How to resolve the dispute? Light pointed to a 1971 case in which the high court reversed the conviction of a man who wore a jacket that said "F---k the Draft" inside a courthouse in Los Angeles.

The District of Columbia is home to what's widely considered the gold-standard of local public defender offices, but a panel of right-to-counsel advocates today challenged the courts and the criminal justice community not to grow complacent.

"D.C. is a place where the expectations are incredibly high, and they should be," said Jonathan Rapping, a former local public defender who founded Gideon's Promise, an Atlanta-based organization that supports public defender offices in southern states. When it came to ensuring access to justice, he urged local attorneys and judges to ask among themselves, "What else can we do?"

Rapping was part of a panel today during the annual joint session of the Judicial Conference of the District of Columbia and the D.C. Bar. The theme of this year's bench-bar conference was access to counsel, in light of the 50th anniversary of Gideon v. Wainwright, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that secured the right to counsel for criminal defendants.

At almost every Senate judicial confirmation vote, both political parties unleash a flurry of statistics about the high number of vacancies on the federal court benches. Democrats use the numbers to paint Republican senators as obstructionists. Republicans use numbers to blame the White House for being slow on nominations.

That is, at least as far as the Wheeler can discern about a nominations process generally conducted outside of public view. He looked at the history of nominations and the 84 actual and future vacancies on the district and circuit courts.

Weil,
Gotshal & Manges has a new leader of its Washington office. Steven Tyrrell
is taking over as managing partner after the firm’s former D.C. managing
partner, Michael Lyle, and litigation partner Eric Lyttle announced their
departure for Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan.

Lyle
and Lyttle are the latest partners to defect from Weil to join Quinn. In
January 2012, partner William Burck left Weil for Quinn to serve as co-head of
the Washington office, alongside Jon Corey. News of the lateral move was first
reported by Above the Law on Wednesday. The Am Law Daily also covered the move.

Before
joining Weil in February 2010, Tyrrell was chief of the Fraud Section at the
U.S. Department of Justice, where he oversaw about 60 attorneys. In an
interview, Tyrrell said the firm will accelerate its plan for growth in the
D.C. office.

“It
is likely we will be adding people in the regulatory area,” Tyrrell said. “This
is an important growth area for the firm and when the right opportunities come
up, we will make moves.”